If you read my previous post then you already know I'm using Jekyll to generate this website. Today I want to share how Grunt makes hacking and blogging so much more pleasurable around here.

Simple and Beautiful

I'm an hedonistic person, I like when things look pretty, work in a quiet and efficient manner and make you feel comfortable: I like working on a pleasurable way. No need to say, but I've never liked any blogging platform very much.

But Jekyll is so cool, it just sits there, diligently building your website as you move plain text files around. And that's pretty much it, If you can move text files to the right places, Jekyll will carry on building your website and keeping everything shiny and neat. Enters Grunt.

Grunt will do everything else for you: transform text files from one format to another and then moving them around for you, gently poking Jekyll to put all the pieces together, and finally taking the whole lot and sending it to GitHub Pages.

The list above contains both Grunt task contributed by the community, as well as tasks that I configured to build and manage this website. Feel free to read the Gruntfile.js to see all the implementation details.

The Workflow

With this setup I can make design, code and content changes, while getting immediate feedback in the browser:

Hacking and blogging

~ grunt

Once everything is ready, I can deploy my changes with a single command:

Deploying to GitHub pages

~ grunt deploy

Sometimes the gh-pages directory gets messed up, mainly because I delete it by mistake.
Even when Grunt can recreate the missing directory just fine, the .git directory with all the GitHub Pages deployment details inside it gets lost, which in turn contains all the deployment details. That means loosing the gh-pages directory breaks my deployments. No biggie:

Housekeeping and troubleshooting

~ grunt gh_reset

Would I use it again?

Absolutely yes, in fact I have already started a new project using Jekyll and very similar workflow. Also, I'm planning to build a Yeoman generator to make the process of starting new Jekyll projects easier.

Hopefully you are enjoying my ramblings. Watch this space for the third and final part on this series. I'll talk about Yeoman and Disqus integration (yes, you can comment on this).